How Did You Get This Number Read online

  “Wait, wait.” I flipped my book open to the blank papers at the end. I sketched a quick map of the earth, using the kind of sloppy squiggling that makes Florida the size of Italy. In the circle I drew the picture I had in my head when I came here: that of a plane going from New York to Lisbon, leaving a dotted line in its wake. It looked smaller on the page than it had in my head.

  “Naway Yorkah! ”said the boy.

  When they managed to ask me what I was doing there, I drew two equally sized figures: one a stick drawing of myself and the other a full glass of ink-colored wine. Pushing the book aside, I supplemented my sketch with the universal hand gesture for “sucking back the sauce.” They looked concerned. The boy huddled his eyebrows together. I worried that he might cry real tears, ruining the perfectly rendered one already painted on his cheekbone. On him, I imposed a backstory of his entire clown family dying in a clown car pileup. He was then raised by some unfunny guardian who drank too much and beat him with the lion-taming crop and made him work the cotton-candy mills. Now even the faintest suggestion of substance abuse takes him back to his days spinning sugar, wishing his alkie clown overlord would choke on his foam nose.

  “No, no.” I drew three wineglasses in a row, circled them, and drew a hard line across the glasses.

  “NOT AN AL-CO-HOL-IC,” I enunciated, dragging the pen back and forth.

  Relieved, they settled in. The girls rearranged the wire skeletons beneath their skirts. The boy brushed aside his jacket tails and relaxed. And we proceeded to play Pictionary at a third-grade level. When I ran out of margins, the second girl ran up to the bar and returned triumphantly with a fistful of fresh cocktail napkins. It’s amazing what you can glean from people by doodling. Using stick figures to represent themselves, I learned that they were in fact in clown college. Not in addition to regular school but with the specific intent of becoming professional clowns. A topic they took very seriously.

  In the most elaborate doodle of the night, they asked me to join them for their dress-rehearsal clown practice. It was just down the street. There would be comedy sketches. And fire swallowing. Or maybe blow jobs, the sign language for which is practically identical. There was also a party for one of their classmates, just back from the hospital after an unfortunate altercation between a tightrope and his groin.

  “Never play leapfrog with a unicorn, huh?” I asked under my breath.

  They ignored me and kept drawing, interrupting each other with gobs of Portuguese. By the time they finished, their doodle looked like an early sketch for The Scream. Overlaid with an early sketch for a three-ring orgy.

  “Frankly, there’s just not enough midget sodomy in this picture,” the first girl instructed the boy, “and ask yourself: is that really where cotton candy is meant to go?”

  “It melts in more places than your mouth,” said the boy, defending his contribution.

  For all I knew they were just discussing the weather. They rotated the paper on the table without picking it up, their row of smiling faces like telephone wires.

  Would I like to see a three a.m. performance of amateur Portuguese circus clowns? Oh, no, thank you. I declined for the same reason that I had run from the man in the alley. For the same reason I flew to Lisbon to watch hours of QVC porn. The freedom of being an adult, that condition which landed me here to begin with, came with a heavy price. I was beholden to no one. My family and friends back home had flight numbers and dates, sure, but I could be absolutely anywhere. Or, as my father used to put it, “dead in a ditch on the side of the road.” As opposed to all the ditches built in the centers of roads. Point was: who were these clowns? If I went with them, I could wind up in a basement somewhere, unable to call for help in the proper language. Or, knowing Lisbon, the catacombs beneath the cellar beneath the basement.

  However, with each glass of wine, our communication morphed from frustrating to liberating. The stick figures became increasingly elaborate, bordering on perverse. They went through puberty, developing scalloped breasts and generous crotchal endowments. It was enough to make you wish all human relations could be boiled down like this. We should all have to carry around paper-doll versions of ourselves, pointing to what hurts, pointing to what doesn’t. It was like those ridiculous ABC After School Specials on AIDS and child abuse and class warfare, the ones that made Degrassi High look like quality programming.

  “Show me, Suzy,” said a permed and frost-tipped child psychologist. “Show me on the doll where the bad man touched you.”

  And Suzy would point. And the adult in the room would nod. And Suzy’s hair would get tousled, because everything was going to be okay. She didn’t have to be afraid anymore. How nice that must be, I always thought. Not the scarredfor-life or my-stepfather-is-up-for-parole part. But the part where you could momentarily explain all your vital information with the extension of an index finger. All you have to do is point, and with the speed of a near-death montage, every issue in your life is transferred to the closest listener. For a brief moment, the brain you’ve made such a mess of is someone else’s problem. Here, you take this. I’ve been living with this model for thirty years, and I don’t know what to do with it anymore.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?” asked the girls in unison.

  I pointed at the surrealist orgy sketch and made a walking gesture with my fingers. There’s no such thing as a stockpile of missed opportunities. You just have to trust that the world knows what it’s doing when it sends a bunch of circus freaks your way. Also, I had never seen cotton candy used like that before.

  “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

  They embraced one another and then me. We had time for one final round before clown practice, and I watched my first friend’s eyes flicker beneath her beanie bangs. A wry smile came over her face. She grabbed my book and pinched the acknowledgments page, poised to tear it out.

  “Si?” She looked at me.

  “Go for it.” I nodded.

  She clutched the pen and scribbled, blocking the others with her elbow. When she was done, she revealed a doodle-confession regarding an affair with her teacher (a stick figure with a pipe in his mouth and extra-large clown shoes). The second girl muttered something to the effect of “No, you shut up.” The first spoke in Portuguese but continued to draw at the same time, as if employing a type of sign language for my benefit. Closed Captioning for the American Tourist. She slung her arm around my shoulders, keeping me on her side as the bedlam unfolded. She felt possessive of me. I was her discovery, just as Lisbon was mine.

  This, finally, was something I understood. People who have spent time in Lisbon talk about the city as if it’s theirs. The city allows for this sense of possession in a way that more heavily trafficked places do not. If you are in Lisbon in December, it is very possible to walk past a store window, knowing that it will not host another reflection for whole hours. It is possible to look out onto the river and feel that you are the only one to look at it this way for centuries. And it is possible to be minding your own business and accidentally befriend a monolingual home-wrecking lady clown and her band of merry mimes.

  The boy refused to believe her. He jumped up from the table while holding down his top hat to keep it from flying off from shock. To emphasize her point, the girl decided to take things to the next dimension. With her nails, she tore around the figure representing herself and the figure representing the teacher. She circled the crotches of each person, picked them up, and rubbed them together until the paper thinned to shreds. Then she put the shreds in her mouth and swallowed the whole affair with a big gulp of wine.

  Lost in Space

  Things were better during my genius years. I was eighteen months old when my mother found me in the living room with a pile of building blocks—counting and spelling as I stacked them. This wunderkind behavior continued, and as it is with oddities in children and the mothers who birthed them, mine called a medical professional. My mother spoke about my rate of development. She had recently read
a drugstore novel about a super-genius test-tube baby who, moments out of the womb, had mastered blinking and staring at fixed objects. Granted, the baby went on to manipulate people with his mind, using his parents as puppets for world domination. But if drugstore-novel baby was any sort of barometer, I would be doing quadratic equations with my Cray-Pas by the end of the week. Tests were done. Psychologists were consulted. Special schools were researched. Should I be put in genius-kid school? Should I skip a grade? Two? Better wait a while and see if she “evens out,” said the doctor. And he was right. While my parents doted on me, overzealously plying me with brain food and brainteaser games, a healthy case of the stupids kicked in, offsetting my block-building brilliance.

  Blind to my sluggish development, my mother cried “genius” to anyone who would listen. All the while wiping away my doltish spittle while I swatted at her necklaces and played with my belly button.

  By the time I was old enough to go to the bathroom on my own, I was just like every other kid. Maybe a little bright, but nothing to necessitate a lampshade. When it came to bedtime reading, I was less moon, more bowl full of mush. I also wet my bed, once mistook a wax candle for candy, and habitually banged my head so hard against the wall while I slept that my father installed padding. I was out of the woods.

  Then one day, after years of mediocrity, all the kids in my grade were told we’d have to take a test on Iowa. I tried to piece together everything I knew about this subject, but I was eleven years old and my brain was like a slot machine: I put in “Iowa,” pulled the lever, and it came up all corn. When at last the test landed on my desk, I found that “the lowas” was the name of a basic skills test, the standardized kind administered to public-school kids. I assumed the test was concocted by someone in the Midwest for whom the question “If Suzy has twenty bales of hay and Jimmy borrows a bale per month until the frost, how many bales does Suzy have left?” was not hypothetical. I thought I did okay. In reality I bombed, landing in a breathtakingly low, of-the-masses percentile. The school called, expressing grave concern. Had all that unconscious head banging finally caught up with me? Should I be held back a grade? Two? In one section of the test, we had to look at a series of everyday objects, match them with their proper names, and fill in the bubbles on a Scantron sheet. I got nineteen out of thirty wrong.

  “Sloane doesn’t know what a spatula is,” the school psychologist offered. The “Need I say more?” was silent.

  “Oh, please,” said my mother. With the new cordless phone in one hand and my wrist in the other, she marched me to the kitchen, flung open a drawer, and held a rubber paddle in front of my face.

  “This,” she said, loudly enough for the school psychologist to hear, “is a spatula. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I nodded.

  My mother went on to explain my brush with brilliance, my aptitude for genius, my general awesomeness, but the school was having none of it. They insisted I take an IQ test. The test was a combination of oral logic questions, written analogies, and pictures of deformed animals with missing hooves and otherworldly trees that failed to cast shadows. There would have to be something profoundly wrong with you to look at a one-legged donkey and see nothing amiss with that picture. But my cockiness took an instant beating with the math portion of the exam. Even the school psychologist was stunned, and she expressed her surprise by helping me cheat.

  “How many people do you think there are in the world?” she read from a clipboard.

  “A billion?” I bid on humanity.

  “Oh, come on.” She raised her thumb as if I was lowballing her.

  Even with her help, I failed spectacularly. After getting gold stars on the first half of the test, I think she thought I was intentionally trying to throw the math section. For what purpose, I do not know. I was not raised in a movie where it’s better to be a dumb jock than a bookish band geek. It was better to just be a super-hot band geek.

  The psychologist informed my parents that she had rarely seen such a right-left brain discrepancy. At least not in kids who made it through the day without soiling themselves in public. And with that I was diagnosed with a severe temporal-spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial-relations skills. It was official: I was a genius trapped forever in an idiot’s body. The reason I did so poorly on the Iowas was that the questions were multiple choice and presented vertically. Once I had decided on an answer (say, “spatula”), I had to remove my eyes from the paper and shade in the corresponding choice in a horizontal line of bubbles. This, much like reading a map, playing cards, or telling time on an analog clock, was an impossibility for me. The chances of my ever achieving a non-embarrassing level of mathematical functionality were about as good as the chances of Jimmy’s returning those bales of hay.

  My teachers were told to be sensitive about this, but my mother, armed with a biased skepticism and a master’s in special education, started testing me at home. Just to be sure. She’d tell me to get something that was to the right or to the left of something else. She quickly discovered that I had already found ways of masking my panic—saying I was distracted while I was actually desperately trying to figure out the answer. I could feel her staring at the back of my head. I spent a lot of time like this, faking daydreams while counting or trying to guess which way is west if this way is north.

  Another thing about having the village idiot camped out in half your brain is that the other half is forced into some resourceful public-relations work. At school, if someone asked me what time it was, the better-brain half would put its hand over the lesser half’s mouth, and I’d say my watch was broken. Or I’d wear some numberless, handless, spinning-faced gadget on which no one with human eyes could tell time. The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down. To this day, I’ve never met a clock that works properly. I think there’s something faulty with the way they make the hands these days. Something in the screws, maybe. But who needs a watch when you have a cell phone? Problem solved.

  By age twelve, I started wearing a bracelet on my left wrist so I could look down and associate it with that direction. At the age of sixteen, I discovered it would take me twice as long as my peers to drive anywhere. No matter what part of town I happened to find myself in, I was swinging past my house between destinations to reorient myself. The good news was that my visual memory became stronger. I could tell you what you wore two weeks ago. I could memorize the internal organs of a fetal pig. I could sketch the contents of my locker in accurate detail—I just couldn’t find it.

  Flunking more of my classes than not, I was placed in an all-grade after-school program called The Learning Center. Which was purposefully veiled in a maze of confusion by the school’s architects. “Center,” I will say, was totally misleading. Perpetually late, I usually found that the only seats available were next to a mute paraplegic girl whose hair was done in bows, or the prematurely sexualized kid who told our teacher he’d like to “bone the fuck” out of her. Each week I sat next to the girl and read for an hour, handing her colored pencils and waiting for someone to ask me if I needed help with my homework. I declined. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of the other kids.

  Around this time, a couple of teachers broached the possibility of my taking my SATs orally. Throughout high school, they had slyly allowed me to circle my answers on the tests themselves, forgoing the Scantron sheet. Being a teenager is hard enough without having people look over at your exam paper to see an insane pattern of misplaced carbon dots in the margins. You know who else does that? Disaffected psychopaths in laced boots and trench coats.

  But the SATs were bigger than high school. They plugged you into the rest of the nation. They ingrained a sense of patriotism that the chin-ups on the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge had failed to do. In suburban New York, your life began in earnest once you took the SATs. They were the first determining factor for the next four years, a canary into the mines of your future. A dead canary,
and you were looking at a nail-polish-merchandising degree from Pump My Stomach State. So, the nightmare of having to think out loud in the midst of all that pressure, to change your mind, to search someone else’s face for signs of your rightness ... It was too much. Instead, I sat with my mother in the same spot where she had once found me stacking blocks, and we devised a plan. I would write each answer on a Post-it note. Then I would unstick the note from the test, stick it to the answer sheet, and reread it while I made the correct mark. Not permitted to bring outside materials into the exam room, I padded my bra with Post-it notes. The proctors were accustomed to no end of odd teenage behavior. They said nothing when I periodically scratched my strangely square breasts.

  This worked well enough to get me into college. But it couldn’t work every day. I was living in the movie Labyrinth, but without the evil-puppet factor. I have never outgrown that feeling of constant disorientation. Rather, the feeling has followed me around like a homing device.

  I finally came to terms with this when I was returning home from college the Thanksgiving of my freshman year. My father and I stopped off at a sprawling Connecticut market with curving aisles and outdoor spaces and multiple entrances. We split up. When I had collected the items on my half of the list, I tried to find him. For fifteen minutes, I circled back through the crowds and around shortcuts that landed me in places I had just left. I was at a loss. Should I ask someone to lead me to the manager’s office, where I could call my father over the PA system? I once heard that you can find your way out of any maze by keeping your hand on the left side of the wall. Great, but which side was left? Damn you, David Bowie. Maybe I could live here, mop-ping and stocking my way to room and board. Eventually I gave up beneath a sign for Festive Pumpkins!, thinking it was best to stay put until my father found me.